Insider Digg's race to build the new Google Reader

The Digg motto, sprinkled
throughout the office, provides lighthearted motivation for the
team

Jon Snyder/Wired

Reader shuts down, Digg starts up
McLaughlin saw a blog post in the Autumn of 2012 speculating that
Google Reader, choked of resources, was shutting down. He sent a
teasing note to a friend at Google offering to "take it off their
hands." To his surprise, he got a serious reply. Google, his friend
replied, had concluded that it couldn't sell the name, user data,
or code base (which would only run on their servers) and so there
was nothing to actually buy.

The following February, McLaughlin, now full-time at Digg,
bumped into this same pal at a TED conference. The friend warned
him to act fast if he really did want to develop a Reader. "He said
'I'm not telling you anything, but we're not going to keep this
thing around forever and maybe you want to have something ready by
the end of the year."

But instead of year's end Google announced plans to shutter
Google Reader on 1 July. That same night, Digg put up a blog post
announcing that it was going to build a replacement. The internet
went crazy.

The idea of Digg building a Reader replacement just resonated.
The revamped Digg.com was already popular, especially in news and
developer circles. It had a reputation for scrumptious headlines
and kickers, courtesy of editorial director David Weiner, a HuffPo
alum. Its tech team, led by CTO Michael Young had already shown
serious backend chops, which meant people didn't doubt its ability
to pull off building a reader. The same minimalist sensibility that
design director Justin Van Slembrouck had given the front page of
Digg would translate well to the new project, and, hell: its GM
Jake Levine might even be able to figure out a way to monetise it
in ways Google never had.

Because, ultimately, this is about money. Betaworks wasn't
throwing resources at a Digg Reader for altruistic reasons. The
plan was to develop something with a mix of free and paid features.
Maybe they'd charge a dollar for the iOS app or for tracking a
large number of feeds; maybe the ability to search feeds would
command a premium.

"I think we have a fantastic opportunity to be selling from day
one," McLaughlin predicted during an all-hands meeting in late
April. "We'll have something for free, something for pay. What we
want are users who care enough about it to pay as a base, and then
to build on top of that."

A Digg Reader would also make Digg itself better. The core
Digg experience is one of discovery: it constantly has to be
showing you something new to work. That means it has to find
stories people will care about very quickly. Right now, it does
that with algorithms that analyze new links trending on social
networks. To get even faster, it would need to find stories before
they trend on Twitter or explode across Facebook. This is where it
gets neat: if Digg had its own news reader, it could immediately
identify which stories people were actually reading -- not just
what they click on. Digg buttons and sharing icons built into
reader amplify that signal, it lets them know, immediately, that
something is getting attention.

In fact, it could be a perfect fit with the rest of the
Betaworks puzzle -- Chartbeat could point out stories that are
being read all the way through; Bit.ly could give insight into what
people are linking to; and Instapaper could even show which stories
people may want to read but don't have time to, right
now. Its own reader would give Betaworks a way bigger piece of the
fast. But the only sure way to grab that fast was to tie its fate
to the exodus of passionate Google Reader fans.

RSS is a fundamentally broken system

McLaughlin knows the risks of that tie-up. Those same fans who
were so excited to have a new reader would turn on them in an
instant if they rolled out a shitty product. "It's like vapour good
will for vapourware; we've benefitted by the fact that we're kind
of underdogs," he explained. "All of it could vanish."

And they were already behind. Feedly, another excellent reader,
was also racing to replace Google Reader. It already had four
million users the day Google announced Reader's shutdown. (The
service has added another 8 million since.)

It was time to get to work. First they needed to figure out how
to actually get people into a Digg Reader, whatever that would
be.

"One thing I've noticed playing around with all these other
readers is that they're mostly pretty crappy onboarding
experiences," McLaughlin said at a meeting in early April. They
needed to make onboarding -- just the process of getting your feeds
out of Google and into Digg -- super easy.

This was exactly the kind of unsexy, necessary work that would
take up much of the next three months.